THE JERUSALEM DUALITY AND THE PROBLEM WITH TELEPORTATION
In “The Jerusalem Duality,” Season 1, Episode 12, Sheldon outlines his problems with teleportation.
“Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super-fast travel is to build a [hyperloop] tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment.
—Elon Musk, Wired (2012)
“Matter and energy are equivalent, according to the equation E=mc2, where E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light,” Merapa explained. “Matter can’t be transported at the speed of light but energy can. Therefore, during a time shift transformation, matter is converted to energy then condenses back. In other words, all the molecules in your body have been changed from matter to energy then back again.”
“Wow. It’s a wonder it’s not fatal,” Dirck said.
“Sometimes it is. If any transcription errors occur between the DNA and RNA in your vital organs, you’re all but dead.”
—Marcha A. Fox, Beyond the Hidden Sky (2012)
Short Cut
In “The Jerusalem Duality,” Sheldon and Leonard talk about teleportation and its problems. Sheldon decides, understandably, that he is firmly against being disintegrated, even if an exact copy of him is made after recombination. He just can’t allow a creation as perfect as himself to be destroyed.
Now, the fictional dream of teleportation goes back many years. The idea is one of being able to transmit, in an instant, a massive body across spacetime, and recreate it faithfully and exactly, at another location in spacetime. The idea gets an airing in early Jewish myth, where it’s referred to as Kefitzat Haderech, literally meaning “the shortening of the way,” or “short cut.” This mythical term was later used by American writer Frank Herbert in his famous 1965 novel, Dune, often cited as the world’s bestselling sci-fi novel and made into a David Lynch movie in 1984. Herbert names the hero of the book the “Kwisatz Haderach,” a genetically engineered “short cut” to a posthuman future and the establishment of a “homo superior.”
Many historical tales of magic and myth have people spirited away, as if by teleportation. But the kind of magic invoked here is mystical or divine, rather than scientific. The first modern fictional account of teleportation was the 1877 story The Man Without a Body by Edward Page. In this tale, the scientist hero successfully disassembles his cat, telegraphs its atoms, then reassembles them. Sadly, while trying to repeat the experiment on himself, a badly timed power cut meant only the scientist’s head was transmitted. This kind of teleportation problem seems common. In The Fly, originally a 1957 short story, but also made into three movies, the grotesque consequences of teleportation are explored. Another luckless scientist, tinkering with teleportation, mistakenly finishes up by fusing himself with a fly in what is meant to be a harrowing, but is in fact largely hysterical, sequence of events (assuming, dear reader, we share the same kind of macabre sense of humor).
Since those early days, teleportation has become common in science fiction and fantasy. For example, in the 1939 Buck Rogers TV serial, teleportation was the preferred means of travel for characters moving through spacetime. Perhaps Leonard and Sheldon mostly associate teleportation with the phrase “Beam me up, Scotty” from Star Trek. In this seminal television series, legend has it that the show’s creators planned to have the characters land their spacecraft on planetary surfaces, but budgetary constraints on the special effects department meant a more creative solution was needed, and so the transporter was born.
In the Harry Potter franchise, a form of phenomenon similar to teleportation is carried out using a Vanishing Cabinet. Like a kind of wormhole made by gothic furniture, a pair of Vanishing Cabinets acts as a passageway between two places in spacetime. An object placed in one cabinet will appear in the other. Cabinets can teleport wizards, too. The method was commonly used during wars, when, to hide from a Death Eater attack, a wizard would disappear to the other cabinet, until the peril had passed. If one of the cabinets is broken, however, the wizard caught traveling between the two cabinets is trapped in a type of limbo.
In the 2006 British-American movie The Prestige, the world of Victorian stage magic is explored. The film focuses on the way rival stage magicians in London, at the end of the nineteenth century, engaged in competitive one-upmanship to create the best stage illusions. In those days, magicians had worked out how to use full-length mirrors to bend light in order to create disappearing illusions. However, the movie had a more interesting teleportation twist. To keep ahead of his rivals, one magician meets real-life inventor Nikola Tesla, played in the movie by David Bowie. Tesla creates a teleporting cabinet known as the Transported Man. But there’s a hitch in the invention. Instead of teleporting the magician who climbs into the cabinet, the Transported Man creates a clone of the magician, which has to be dropped into a water tank below the stage and drowned to kill off any clone confusion!
The Question of Sheldon Duplication
Teleportation in fiction has influenced theorists to dream up ways of teleporting in fact. One possible method is using quantum technology. Matter transmission of this kind would mean the original object or person being destroyed, and pieced together elsewhere. This is exactly what Sheldon is talking about in The Big Bang Theory episode titled “The Jerusalem Duality.”
One can easily imagine why this might have attendant difficulties. What if the “piecing together” of Sheldon doesn’t go according to plan? There are trillions of atoms in the human body. And that means Sheldon would have to be broken down into individual atoms before each was catalogued, digitized, and teleported. Then the whole process would have to be done in reverse, to assemble Sheldon in the new location. And where would his soul go, though Sheldon probably doesn’t believe in such a thing. (This also raises the possibility of perhaps splitting the soul into constituent parts, but that’s a matter for Harry Potter fans.)
One solution to the problems of piecemeal teleportation is duplication. Here, rather than the simultaneous destruction and recreation of Sheldon, the teleportation simply generates an exact duplicate Sheldon at distance. This would no doubt worry Leonard, as one Sheldon is enough to be dealing with, let alone two or more.
Experiments in teleportation began in 2002, when Australian scientists successfully teleported a laser beam by scanning a specific photon, copying it, and then recreating it at an arbitrary distance. Science teams in Germany and the US then independently teleported ions of calcium and beryllium using very similar techniques. A further development happened in Denmark in 2006. There, scientists teleported an object half a meter away. Although minuscule in scale, the object in the Danish experiment was nonetheless constructed from billions of atoms.
Professor Michio Kaku of The City University of New York, believes the technology to teleport a living person elsewhere on Earth, or even to outer space, could be available by the end of the century. Kaku, known as a noted futurist who admits to optimism on topics such as time travel and invisibility, has made a study of various fictional technologies and determined some will one day happen. Apparently. Kaku suggested, “You know the expression ‘beam me up, Scotty,’ we used to laugh at it. We physicists used to laugh when someone talked about teleportation and invisibility, something like that, but we don’t laugh anymore—we realized we were wrong on this one. Quantum teleportation already exists. At an atomic level we do it already. It’s called quantum entanglement.” He described the process as one that allows connections, somewhat like an umbilical cord, to be formed between atoms, with their information transmitted between others farther away. “I think within a decade we will teleport the first molecule,” Kaku concluded.
So, Leonard can rest easily. The replication of multiple Sheldons will remain a fantasy for some time to come. Hopefully.